Archive

Taking part in Wikipedia has been an unforgettable experience. It is quite an experience to notice that so many people try hard to make Wikipedia a serious and intellectual encyclopedia. If something is not written as an encyclopedia, they do state that it should be written in another way, and it is great to see that people care about it. It is interesting to notice that not only one person writes the article, but many people do it at the same time, which is one of the most enrichening elements Wikipedia has.

We had our articles’ drafts already planned and written down in our Littera Wiki so we really only had to transfer them into the real Wikipedia. What really amazed me the most is the speed with which people work at Wikipedial. Just a few seconds after having uploaded our version, corrections appeared all over the article by people and even robots. The links were corrected almost intantaneously, as they were external links which were turned into internal ones.

The sources selected when describing the movie Spring Subway, have been all written by people who know about the subject of Chinese cinema. Yingjin Zhang, who wrote the book Chinese national cinema, is an Associate Professor of Chinese, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, so not only is he Chinese, but knows about literature and film studies, being his point of view of much interest when we talk about the new genres arousing in Chinese cinema.

He received his M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1987 and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in 1992. Before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2001, he taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was honored with an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 1996. He served asPresident of the American Association of Chinese Comparative Literature in 1993-94 and received, among others, a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan in 1995-96, a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999, a Pacific Cultural Foundation Research Grant (Taipei) in 2000, a Fulbright China Research Fellowship in 2003-04, and a UC Humanities Research Institute Fellowship (Irvine) in 2005. He also taught at the University of Chicago, Nanjing University (China), and Shanghai Jiaotong U (China) as a visiting professor.

As our Wikipedia article is going to be about a Chinese movie, we consider it important to have people who are deeply implied in the concept of Chinese cinema, which is the case of all the authors cited above.

As Hugh Gregory (1999) stresses, in the 60s, American society turned its head to the East, to discover new ways of thinking, of understanding life and of living it. It was the perfect complement for the hippiemovement: a thousand-year-old phylosophy with great ideas about physical and mental peace, as Ricardo Ribera (2003) reminds us. Thus, young hippies began to practice yoga, to convert intoHinduism and, of course, to listen to Hindi music. This last one, became more and more popular among youngsters, and singers, such as George Harrison, member of the Beatles, mentalized that different type of music. Music made by Ravi Shankar was the greatest influence of Oriental Music for the hippie music. Gregory (1999) states that now, a new music genre came on scene: the Psychedelic music, as the interest about oriental music was closely associated with the supposed spiritual “benefits” of the LSD, the drug on fashion at that time.

Be careful with Twitter: According to Ben Parr (2011), the micro-blogging service has more than 100 million active users and surpassed 200 million tweets per day in June but has since jumped to nearly 250 million daily tweets. The growth has been tremendous: Twitter had around 100 million tweets per day in January 2011″. Apart from that, of those 100 million active users, more than the 50% log in everyday. Being such as successful web-site, only when we know how to use Twitter in a productive way, and to make it productive, only when we know how to have a better Twitter experience and use it in academic environments, and using devices created by Twitter, such as the hash tags, only then, we will have a full Twitter experience, which will enhance our views about the world, and that will be part of a collective knowledge that will be useful to everyone interested on it. Read more…